Meditation for Sunday, November 18, 2012: “The End of the World This Week?”

The readings from both the Epistle (Hebrews 10:11-25) and the Gospel (Mark 13:1-8) point to the end of the age, the Day of the Lord, with apocalyptic language — blood, war, earthquakes, and famine.  I must admit that the end times have never been of much interest to me, but then again, as a white male middle class economically secure American living in New England, why would it? Life is, for the most part, pretty good, and I’m in no hurry for it to end. Our earliest ancestors in faith lived lives of physical labor, were viewed with suspicion by their neighbors and were often persecuted. The end of time must have had some appeal, since suffering would be ended, the persecutors would have to answer God for their actions, and life would then be lived with Jesus. Who am to not give the topic at least some thought?

Sermon: B 16 Pentecost 19 Proper 16 September 2012

Prv 1:20-33; Wis 7:26-8.1; Jms 3: 1-12; MARK 8: 27-38

May it be your will, Holy and Eternal One, God of our forebears, that you renew for us a good and sweet year.

In every generation Wisdom enlighten holy souls, making them friends of God, making them prophets. For God loves nothing so much as the person who lives with Wisdom, (from today’s Canticle.) With such thinking, Jesus asks his disciples, “Who do people say that I am? Who do you say that I am?” After a series of wild wrong and safe guesses, Peter answers, “You are the Messiah.” Then Jesus orders them to tell no one. His order for secrecy is in Mark’s Gospel and is somewhat puzzling. If everyone were told Jesus was Messiah, it would have both made it difficult for Jesus to continue preaching, healing, and working to bring about God’s reign, as well as to deal with people who didn’t believe him and were trying to hinder, thwart, and otherwise stop him. Supporters and opponents would, each and both, have made Jesus’s work difficult to continue, so Mark says he urged those around him to secrecy. We’re used to reading and hearing Peter’s declaration of Jesus’s identity in Epiphany, Lent, and sometimes in late summer, but what Jesus goes on to say, inset into today’s readings, to teach, and declare are more the today’s focus.

Sermon: B 14 Pentecost 17 Proper 2 September 2012

Song 2:8-13; Ps 45: 1-2, 7-10; Jas 1: 17-27; MK 7: 1-23

This is the Day the Lord has made; let us give thanks for it, health and strength to work, minds to think, and hands to serve. AMEN.

“But those who look into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and persevere, being not hearers who forget but doers who act—they will be blessed in their doing” instructs James. Jesus replies to some accusing Pharisees, “Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites, as it is written, ‘This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines.’ You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.” The struggle in these lessons is about hearing and doing, upholding religious traditions and doing what religion values doing. Goodness knows, Anglo-Catholic parishes, ones of “smells and bells” are accused of doing dead or passé forms, and not getting out there, rolling up our sleeves, and bringing about the reign of God.